Suffering by Comparison

[livingdeb]

Once I made the terrible mistake of dressing up as a ballroom dancer for Halloween at work. I wore a sparkly and whooshy dress, and I carried around a jam box playing a tape of ballroom dance music and I danced between my desk and the in-box, my desk and the printer, etc.

The reason I decided it was a terrible mistake is that it brought into very sharp relief how much less fun my job was than ballroom dancing was. It's hard to explain, but although generally I was satisfied with my job, on that day it seemed depressingly boring.

I'm getting the same kind of feeling now, just in comparison to reading on the way to and from work and in comparison to eating lunch, even when I'm eating alone. Maybe that's why I'm eating so much at work these days. I would enjoy eating continuously if I let myself.

In the olden days, after a rough day at work, where I felt like I just wanted to go to sleep, then as soon as I stepped out of the building into the beautiful sun and the beautiful plants, I would suddenly feel inexplicably happy and energetic. Now I feel sleepy even after I get home.

And my job is not that bad. It's not like I--wait, before I continue, think of the worst job you can imagine. No, worse than that. When I tried that, I decided that the worst job I could imagine was having to remove dead animals from the road. But then I read someone else's list, and at the top (bottom) of that list was crack whore. Okay, that would probably be a worse job.

So, it's not like I'm an animal remover or a crack whore or anything. It's just that I feel so powerless. Today I finally approached someone about a problem; let's call him person X. I learned from him that certain new online forms were no longer accompanied by paper forms. So, I attacked the list of online forms. I found a bug which prevented me from continuing. In a system which is now under the charge of a brand new programmer. So I gave the programmer the bad news.

Then I found another problem that I had to bring to person X, and it turned out that is due to a bug in the same system. Person X will work with the programmer on this one.

Then I found another problem, which I didn't have the heart to bring to person X.

**

Bus strike update: The bus strike was actually averted because our mayor stepped in to help with negotiations because the bus service is important to our citizens. Unbelievable! In my town, mostly just poor people, students, and bleeding-heart liberals use the bus. And our mayor says they're important? Really, it's very odd. The system is so bad that most people would never use it if they had access to a car. In fact, someone I just talked to today only started riding it after his car broke down and he tried it out of desperation and then realized it was less stressful (most days) than driving, and took no more time than driving (since the parking situation at work is terrible).

Comments

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

I can see how your Halloween experience would unfavorably compare to normal drudgery, but I love the image of dancing to the inbox and the printer wearing a whooshy dress!

I used to work music retail, and I'd always catch myself dancing down the aisles to CDs we'd play (not always when the store was empty, either)...aw, now I'm nostalgic!